13.2 The Shetland Witch, or, Atropos Wants Her Shears Back
Enter the Keres ...
The storm keened at her yearningly while Atropos stuffed the knife into a pocket and pulled out the shears again. They gleamed at her, but gleaming and shine was no good to her now.
‘I should have done this at the beginning,’ she thought. She breathed deeply, once, and then she wrenched the shears apart.
It did not hurt much. She felt something new. Something inside her had been separated, come free, something she had never known was there. And now she remembered the sounds that Klotho and Lakhesis had made when they had broken their tools. Oh, this was why she had been sent. She was still tied to her shears, and Zeus had known it.
She gasped, not with pain, or of loss, but with newness. Of birth.
But then she glanced up at the tiny flecks of light on the trembling filaments of the web, far above her. She would need to be quick.
She felt her way to the weakest point in the tether and read its final strands, concentrating her attention on opening up the gaps that the blade – so much more sensitive than the bone knife - told her was there. The winds jostled her, and she blew at her fingers to keep them from freezing.
She had found it.
With a lunge and an upward slice she cut the remaining words of tethering command with the freed obsidian blades, one in each hand, one for each word.
The storm surged upwards and outwards in a boiling mass of wet cloud, as drenching as the sea.
Atropos yelled out in triumph in a wild voice.
<You’ve done it?> Maggie’s voice answered.
<I have freed the storm! Pull now! Pull it through now!>
She stuffed the blades into her pocket and let herself soar upwards, following the storm’s edge.
She reached out to manipulate the web.
She had done this before with Maggie, and it felt quite natural to her now. The great structure felt like a net in her hands. She pulled at it, drawing it down through the rising cloud mass, and the storm sieved through it like rain falling upwards, like light streaming out to the open sky. The web descended. The storm began to break up.
Atropos pulled the web steadily downwards. She wondered when she would feel Zeus’s anger when he realised that the storm was escaping from him.
There had been no answer from Ishabel.
Atropos could feel changes in the web’s tautness and its flexibility. She pulled harder to move it steadily through the roiling masses of frothing cloud surging beneath her.
Finally Ishabel was calling, and she sounded faint. <Too hard. It’s enormous.>
Atropos nodded to herself absently, watching the cloud mass flow past her hands as she balanced between sky and sea. She had known this would happen.
She called out to Maggie and Ishabel.
<Watch for my Keres. They will work for us.>
If a bird had been flying high enough, and had been looking in Atropos’s direction, it would have seen the thin figure of the woman in the air splitting into multiple selves. Her tall form seemed to be dividing again and again, into gossamer thin shadows in her shape. As soon as they formed, they scattered, flying westward and south along the edges of the web. There were tens, then hundreds of them, like angular fragments of cloud themselves, a streaming mass of shapes like a flock of geese, or a cloud of grey gulls, inexorable, and eager. They flew like the light.
When she heard Maggie exclaim at the sight of the Keres hurtling towards her, Atropos stopped the flow. She felt tired, and she ignored the aching feeling. She had to bring this battle to an end.
She began to pull at the web again, urging it downwards.
The Keres closest to her imitated her, grasping at the web with their thin grey fingers, and with a ripple the web began to move downwards all along its edge. Inexorably the remnants of storm that were still trapped shrank. They scattered into the thinnest of substances, and disappeared upwards, out of sight. Rain fell steadily, unbuffeted. The wind had dropped to angry gusts.
Something was left in the outgoing flood, crammed up inside the landward side of the web. It raged in frustration. With gathering speed it began to surge towards her.
Hazel peered upwards into the wet night. The sky was black above and all around. She had no idea what time it was.
She hadn’t heard a thing from Ishabel since she ascended with Maggie to race to the storm’s edge. Atropos and Maggie had been tossing remarks to each other, but Ishabel had been silent.
<What’s going on?>
Hazel jumped. Avril’s voice inside her head was querulous and angry.
<No-one is bloody answering me.>
<Not even Ishabel? I’ve lost her.>
<For god’s sake. What is she doing?>
<I think she’s over North Roe. They’re pushing the storm through the web. High up.>
<Why is she doing that on her own? In this weather!>
<Maggie’s there too. And Atropos.> Hazel knew she sounded feeble.
Avril went quiet. She must be searching, Hazel thought.
<Bloody hell. You didn’t say Maggie was 80 miles away …>
Moments crawled by.
<Ishabel’s struggling. I’m going over there.> And Avril was gone.
Hazel stuttered out a message to Maggie, who grunted at her, sending back a sensation of utter weariness and dogged determination.
Hazel tried to stay watchful. The rain was pouring all around her, but the torrent was getting lighter. The cloud was shrinking, and the clear night sky was growing broader to the west and north. Behind her, the dawn was approaching. Fingers of pink and peach were creeping up from the horizon.
It might be a beautiful day, if only the rain would stop.
But where was Zeus? What would he do?
Something grabbed her ankle.
Hazel yelped, and jerked away, but didn’t drop the grass sphere. She looked wildly about her, and then saw the dark shape on the grass at her feet.
Episode 13.3 will follow.
The Shetland Witch © Kate Macdonald 2024.
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